After years of battling rumors and bad scripts, Tom Selleck, the former Star of Magnum, P.I., is poised for a comeback.

Tom Selleck, 50 years old, emerges from the breakfast room at the
elegant Carlyle Hotel on Manhattan's Upper East Side, right hand
extended in greeting. His hair is shorter and thinner, his forehead
higher, his smiling face broader, his wrinkles more prominent, his
hips, well, just a little wider. He is six-foot-four, but somehow this
day he seems not quite that tall.

Yet, the moment you meet him, you know: He still has the aura, the
charisma, the special feeling of a star.

It has been seven years since "Magnum, P.I."--that hugely successful
TV series with its lanky, courageous and yet somehow quintessentially
goofy Hawaiian private eye--finished its eight-year run on CBS. For
Selleck, much has happened in those seven years.

He has done well with Three Men and a Little Lady, the sequel
to his earlier, very successful Three Men and a Baby. But there
have also been films that were, in one way or another,
disappointments--Her Alibi, An Innocent Man, Quigley
Down Under, Mr. Baseball--movies that may have received
decent or better reviews, and that may have even sold a fair number of
tickets, but that in no way could have been called box-office
smashes. Reporters and gossip columnists wondered frequently whether
Selleck still had it, whether he could make the jump from small screen
to large, whether he was a has-been.

Then, for three years, he stayed away from movies and TV, and the
rumors continued: He just wasn't box office anymore, no one wanted
him, he couldn't even get arrested in Hollywood. It didn't matter that
the rumors weren't true, that he had turned down six movies and had
other reasons for staying away, reasons he has only recently begun to
discuss.

The hiatus ended last summer with a made-for-television movie for TNT
called Broken Trust, in which he played a judge who takes part
in a sting against his fellow jurists. The movie aired in August amid
much publicity, and the reviews for it and for Selleck were uncommonly
good. But that, again, was TV, where it was known he could
succeed. The reports over the summer talked of a new Tom Selleck, but
riding up in the elevator to his suite on the Carlyle's 33rd floor,
attired in casual slacks and rugby shirt, Selleck doesn't look
new--only different, only older.

Yet the voice is charming, the smile affecting, the persona calm,
relaxed, assured. Entering the suite, walking into the living room,
Selleck says he would like to talk about these past three years, to
set things straight. Life has not always been easy, he says; there
have been money concerns, troubles in his four-film contract with the
Disney studio, doubts about his professional future, worries over his
ranch in Thousand Oaks, California, where he lives with his wife,
British actress Jillie Mack, and their seven-year-old daughter,
Hannah. (Selleck also has a 27-year-old son from a previous
marriage.) He and his wife have been married eight years, together
for 12. He loves to work on the ranch, but a year ago, 53 of its 63
acres burned; fortunately, none of his buildings or animals were
harmed.

He sits on a sofa beneath a picture window facing the glowing green of
Central Park and the towers of Central Park West. During the
interview, Selleck will paint a picture of himself exemplified by his
admission: "I've never reacted well to other people telling me what to
do."

He smiles. He is not a new Tom Selleck; he is still Tom Selleck the
individualist, with the same precise sense of right and wrong he has
always possessed, wiser and more experienced. He has come through.

In a way, his decision to take a career break started with
Columbus--Christopher Columbus. Selleck had returned after four months
in Japan filming Mr. Baseball, a difficult and postponed shoot
that would lead to a not very successful movie.

"I hadn't really gotten off the roller coaster since 'Magnum' ended in
'88," he says. "I had been trying to cement my place in the movie
business. And then my agent called and said I'd been offered a job in
Spain, a cameo role as King Ferdinand in Christopher Columbus: The
Discovery. He said that Marlon Brando was doing the movie, so I
thought, if Brando's doing it, I wanted to do it. I wrestled with it a
bit, but not as much as I should have.

"And then, just about the time I was supposed to go over there, Hannah
came down with viral pneumonia. The poor thing had a mask on and she
was on an IV. That was pretty rough. I delayed my leaving, and the day
she was getting out of the hospital was the day I traveled to
Spain. But I should have stayed home. I went to Spain really very
torn, feeling responsible, because the media had somehow found out
about it and were probing around the hospital, and that's pretty tough
to deal with."

When Selleck got to Spain, he found even more problems. "The script
had been completely changed," he says. "Instead of having six scenes,
five of them with Brando, I had something like five scenes, only one
with Brando, and he was only lurking in the background. I said to
myself, 'This isn't right; they're in breach of contract. This is
wrong, and I'm getting out of here.' So I packed. But I talked to my
lawyer in L.A., and he said that while they were in breach, they had
24 hours to cure it, and he said I couldn't get on a plane, that they
would sue me, because they had financed the movie on my name and
Marlon's. I was in this movie for a cup of coffee, maybe three
minutes, and I hadn't even allowed them to bill my name above the
title, and I had to sit on it and stay there."

When Selleck returned to California after filming, his daughter was
fine. "But I didn't feel that going to Spain was the right decision as
a father. I should have listened to something inside me. I should have
said no to the movie. I hadn't spent enough time at home."

As he is speaking, the door to the suite opens, and, as if on cue, his
wife and daughter enter. Jillie is petite, small-boned, with a very
British face and smile, and Hannah, thin and blonde, looks very much
the seven-year-old she is, with a little bit of both parents in her
appearance. Hannah runs over and plants a kiss on her daddy's
cheek. He hugs and kisses her in return, and she sits next to him.

"We just came up to say hello," Jillie says. "We're going to go
out. We might go to the Statue of Liberty." But Hannah firmly shakes
her head no. She wants to stay with her dad.

"Come on, baby," Selleck says to her. "You're going to go with your
mom." He turns to his wife. "I have to talk about her some more." He
pauses as Jillie and Hannah give him a kiss and leave. Where was he?
Ah yes, Christopher Columbus, and the reasons he stayed away from
movies for three long years.

"That movie really caused me to reassess things," he says. "When I've
talked about this before I've talked in terms of the reviews of the
movie, which were pretty bad and very disturbing. But that was six
months later, and that wasn't the real key to me reassessing what my
priorities were. The real reason was my daughter and not being there
for her. I know if she had still been in the hospital I wouldn't have
gone; they would have had to come and arrest me to get me out of
there. But leaving even when she was discharged certainly was not
right."

So he decided to take a year off.

"I just said to myself that the movie stuff was not worth it," he
says. "My daughter was three, and it wasn't that I had been a bad
father, but at that point in my life I could afford to be home a lot
more than I was when my son was that age. In those years, if I got
offered a job and it was in any way beneficial to the career I was
trying to build, I just went. I had to. Now I could afford to say no."
(He has often acknowledged publicly that "Magnum" has made him a
millionaire many times over.)

But the year "turned into a lot longer"--three years, to be
precise. "During that time," he says, "I had signed a four-picture
deal with the Disney studio. I've never talked about this publicly,
because I have a relationship with that company, and when you have
squabbles they should be settled within the family. But there's a new
regime there, and that makes me feel it's reasonably fair now to talk
about that stuff.

"After I signed the deal," he says, "things changed at Disney. Jeffrey
Katzenberg [chairman of the studio from 1984 to 1994], wrote a famous
memo about high costs and high-priced talent. I was pretty high-priced
talent. They had to offer me pictures in good faith within a given
period of time, pictures they were prepared to make. I looked on this
as my annuity. I had worked a long time and I had finally gotten
fortunate. I'd been offered multiple-picture deals at many studios,
but I felt comfortable with Disney because I knew I was right for
about 60 to 70 percent of their product.

"If you look at the movie business," Selleck continues, "you see that
basically for every success you're allowed three flops. And I was
convinced that at least one of these four films was going to be a
success." But times have changed. "I'm not sure that I have that big a
grace period now," he says. "I think people are getting smaller and
smaller grace periods. But I looked on this deal as security. It was a
great deal. But I haven't done a picture for Disney. And now it [has
become] a two-picture deal" due to contract stipulations.

The problem, Selleck says, was in the quality of the movies he was
presented. "I said no to what they offered me. Almost all of it you
won't know about because they never made the pictures. I was wrestling
with a lot of demons at that point. I was angry. What they offered had
to be a picture they were prepared to make, and what they offered they
never made. That's not right. The scripts just weren't good
enough. The movies they offered me were $4.1 million deals. There were
people in the business who told me I should just call their bluff,
that they're going to have to pay me whether or not they make the
movie. But I wasn't really interested in getting paychecks for
nothing.

"The movie business is increasingly driven by a movie's release date,"
Selleck adds. "If a studio wants a movie out by Christmas, it has to
start at a certain time. And if the script isn't ready, they say
they'll fix it. Sometimes that works, but too often it doesn't. I have
always been concerned about getting a script right before you start."

Despite the Katzenberg memo on high-priced talent, he says, he doesn't
really know why things turned out the way they did at Disney. "I fight
very hard against conspiracy theories," he says. "These things
happen. There were good movies being made at Disney, but not as many
as before. What was coming through their development people was really
not good at all, and [Disney] ultimately admitted that there had been
something wrong with their development of live-action features, as
opposed to their animated films."

While all this was going on, Selleck was receiving other film
proposals--but with the kind of roles he had already played; he didn't
like being typecast. "I was reading a lot of material, but I just
didn't like what I was being offered," he says. "The movie industry is
so research-driven, and you get put in a box very quickly. When you do
something that succeeds, you get a lot of offers of clones. I don't
mind doing movies that are in the same ballpark, but when it's almost
like a computer kicked out the right elements, I'm not interested. So
one year turned into three."

He stops for a moment. He is apparently feeling a bit uncomfortable
about what he is saying. "It's not really my style to talk about
this," he says. "But now that I'm coming back, I really felt I had
better try to control the perceptions about my coming back with a
movie for television. The easy angle is that I couldn't get arrested
in Hollywood, and those perceptions can affect your 'hireability.' I
can take whatever people say personally; I'm not going to get that
hurt by it. But I don't want people to think that I wasn't getting
employed and that I'm crawling back to television."

During that time, he kept reading in the gossip columns that he had
disappeared professionally, that his career was in limbo, that he no
longer had what it took. It wasn't easy. "I could tell you it's
business and you don't take it personally," he says, "but that's not
true. On my good days it's business, but on most days there's a
personal element. I'm not selling vacuum cleaners--I'm selling
me. When I talk to young actors, I just say: 'You better be prepared
to persevere and have a pretty thick skin, because the rejection is
personal.' "

There were money concerns as well. "I live a pretty simple life," he
says. "I've been poor. I've been middle class. I've been rich. By most
standards it's better to have more money. You live better, of
course. But, and I don't know how to explain this to most people, your
nut just gets bigger. I don't know what really rich means. Really rich
people, I guess, don't worry about that. I had established enough of a
lifestyle; it wasn't a globe-trotting lifestyle, but it was a
comfortable one, and it was expensive. And I had no money coming
in. There were times when I was worried about where to get money for a
payment, where I would get the cash for this and that."

He laughs uneasily. "And this was at a time when my family business
with my brothers--a real estate development company--needed a certain
amount of cash, because we were in a pretty big recession. Our
company's doing just fine now, but that required cash, my lifestyle
required cash and there was nothing coming in. There were a lot of
film offers that were quite tempting for the money, but I was just
trying to keep my eye on the fact that if something was not good, I
was not going to do it.

"Number one, I didn't want to leave home. I liked being there. My
daughter had started in a prekindergarten class. It was a 45-minute
drive, so we would fight the traffic every morning to take her to
school, and it was great. I was doing all the things I think a parent
should do, if they can afford to. It was very hard to leave this
situation unless [an offer] was good, and nothing good came
along. Meanwhile, everybody was writing that I was going to do a
television series, but I'm not. If I did, Hannah would be asleep in
the morning when I left for work, and asleep in the evening when I
came home. And I don't need to do that. At least not yet."

During those years, Selleck also tried to sell a movie idea to
Universal Pictures--a feature in which he would have again played the
role of Magnum, but with a switch. In the movie, Magnum would be in
the Navy (which he returned to at the end of the series). Selleck's
close friend, novelist Tom Clancy, would have written the story. But
much to the actor's disappointment, the movie never happened.

"Universal was interested," Selleck says. "I went to them after
Mr. Baseball because I heard about all the movies that were
being developed based on television series, such as The
Fugitive and Maverick. I thought a "Magnum" movie would be
a kind of slam dunk, because the show is still seen in 90
countries--we have a huge audience. At first I thought they weren't
talking to me because they thought I would hold them up pricewise. So
I said I would be fair with them. I thought it was a no-brainer, a
no-downside movie.

"But they wanted to know how we could create a perception that this is
a big movie. So I mulled it over and called Tom Clancy, who is a
friend and was a real fan of the show. Magnum's going back to being a
Navy Seal was right up Tom's alley. I asked him what he thought would
be a hot global issue a year from then--this was a couple of years
ago--and he said nuclear proliferation in North Korea," Selleck
says. So I went back and asked Universal if having Tom Clancy would
create enough of a perception that it's a big movie, and they said
yes. And what happened then, in my opinion, was a lot of
foot-dragging. What they would have had a year ago was a very timely
movie that would have dealt with how the North Koreans got their
plutonium, in a very credible Clancyesque way. That's a pretty good
movie."